Vanishing water. Climate change is drying up one of the world’s largest lakes

The two men have been working their way through the nets for more than 30 minutes before they catch a fish.

Ekaale Ewoi pauses in the bow of the boat, silhouetted against the pink morning sky. He glances back at Ekai Longolan, who gently disentangles the small prize. It thuds to the floor of the boat at my feet and thrashes around. Without a word they resume their rhythmic motion, going hand over hand for thirty minutes more, until they reach the bobbing jerry can that means they’ve come to the last of the nets.

There are no more fish.

Longolan indicates the single mudfish, whose struggles have ceased.

“We can’t even sell this one,” he says. “It’s very small. We’ll just use it for consumption.”

Everywhere I travel along the western shore of Lake Turkana—a shoreline that has crept inward over the years as the lake’s waters have retreated—it’s the same story. A long drought lingers on, killing livestock who have nothing left to eat.

In ever greater numbers, Turkana herders have been forced to give up their traditional pastoralist lifestyles and pick up fishing nets—only to find that the catch is disappearing, too. As the supply dwindles due to overfishing, some have turned to using mosquito netting to catch the very smallest fish, only to have those nets confiscated by the Department of Fisheries.

“When I started fishing I only used a raft,” says John Mame. That was 12 years ago. Now he serves as chairman for the Impressa Beach Management Unit, which regulates the fish markets.

“Then from there I got a boat, some many nets, I got my crew members. Then from there, I was able to put my children in school. But now, problem. No water, few water, yeah? No fish. You go to the lake, no fish. I don’t know where they are.”

He laughs, looking downward. “Maybe there are thieves, what what, I don’t know.”

An 180-mile shining ribbon that cuts neatly across northwestern Kenya, Lake Turkana is a vital source of life for more than 1.2 million people. It occupies an arid region bordering Uganda, South Sudan and Ethiopia that is famously known as the “cradle of mankind,” because the oldest known fossils of early humans were unearthed there.

“It’s going the way of the Aral Sea,” Leakey said at a press conference in Nairobi in November, referring to the dried-up lake that straddled Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan before the rivers that fed it were siphoned for agriculture. The current head of the Kenya Wildlife Service and the leader of the team that discovered the “Turkana Boy” skeleton in 1984, Leakey knows the Turkana region well and has been warning of this for years.

“It’s too late to be talking of this now,” he said. “The dam is built. It’s done.”

According to a Human Rights Watch report released in October, Lake Turkana is suffering under a deadly two-pronged assault. Climate change is driving up temperatures, which increases evaporation, and changing precipitation patterns even as development projects across the border in Ethiopia are diverting water from the Omo River, which supplies 90% of the lake’s water.

But the lake—once so vast that some still know it as the Jade Sea—is disappearing. A combination of global warming and water resources projects have caused the inland sea to shrink. And according to paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey, it’s already too late to save it.

Captions under photos:

— Josephine Avon, 26, fills a plastic jerry can with water from a hand-dug well in Longech. The lake is just a few hundred yards away and this is the same salty, high-fluoride water. The only difference is that it’s cleaner than lake water. She intends to use it for drinking.

— Many children who live along the lake, like this boy at Impressa Beach, have bleached copper-colored hair because they swim in the water, which is highly alkaline with a high fluoride content. It can warp and disfigure the bones, eventually rendering someone unable to walk.

The Gibe III hydroelectric dam began generating electricity in October, just days before the report’s release, and massive irrigation canals are in the works. The irrigation projects alone could reduce the Omo’s volume by half.

As the Paris Climate Agreement moves on to its implementation phase, the stakes for developing countries are starkly evident here, at the front lines. As Lake Turkana diminishes and the drought goes on, catastrophe looms. The impacts are already visible.

I see it in the cracked earth that was once underwater, in the nets and decaying boats that lie abandoned a thousand feet from shore. I see it in the face of the little boy hurrying home with the body of a dead goat slung over his shoulder. I see it in the shoulders of the women who must walk two hours each way, every day, to fetch drinkable water for their families. And I see what happens when even that water isn’t enough.

A village called Namakat stands not far from the water’s edge in a bare, almost lunar landscape, a cluster of woven huts the only protection from the relentless sun. Many of Namakat’s children have bright ginger hair, bleached from swimming in the lake’s alkaline, high-fluoride waters.

But there are worse effects when that water is actually drunk, as it is sometimes when potable water isn’t available. And lake water is used for cooking even though boiling can’t remove fluoride—the overconsumption of which can warp and disfigure human bones. One of the Namakat chief’s 16 children has bowed legs and a noticeably enlarged skull. In another village across Ferguson’s Gulf on the peninsula of Longech, a man lies prone, unable to walk, his limbs twisted and wasting away from hunger.

Skeletal fluorosis is just one of several climate-related health problems afflicting this region. At the main health clinic in Kalokol, a small town on the edge of the gulf, Dr. John Ekai reports that the rate of malnutrition among their patients is between 20% and 30%. And they see a significant number of assaults, both violent and sexual in nature.

“Most of the people living around here are fishermen,” Ekai says. “And this idea of selling and buying fish usually brings like a competition. Most of the fights usually come from the lakeside. It’s all about fishing business activities, most of them.”

Anecdotal reports of women bartering sex for fish or a few coins, as well as increased conflict in northern Turkana County over resources and territory, also highlight the desperation many people in these communities feel.

It frankly shocks me to see such a large, vital, culturally distinct region of Kenya in such a hopeless situation. Kenyans are collectively some of the most resourceful people in the world. There’s an entire informal business sector called “jua kali” (literal translation: “fierce sun”), a term that is used broadly to connote cleverness and resourcefulness, an ability to improvise a fix for anything or find a way to make something out of nothing.

Across the country, from slums to very remote areas, people find a way to carve out a living for themselves.

The Turkana have done the same. They’ve adapted again and again. It’s just that everything they’ve tried has quickly turned to ash. They’ve lost their herds, then their fish, then their nets. Now some are burning what trees they can find to make and sell charcoal.

Many have never even heard the term “climate change,” but instead put the long drought down to God’s plan.

Charles Ebuunu remembers growing up in the 1950’s as an idyllic time when livestock were plentiful and the rains came regularly. Now he is an old man who gets by on fish provided by members of his community and by selling loose cigarettes along the nearby beach on Longech.

“We depend on the lake,” he says. “And if the lake dries up I see that the future of the Turkana people is in danger.”

He gazes out at the shore, where a Fisheries vessel has just chugged past on a patrol, drawing a crowd.

“I feel people definitely will die, the way that the animals died in the drought. I think even about dying. It’s better to die than to see children suffering.”